Abstract
In past issues we have reported on accessibility and disability in business and professional communication. Many people with disabilities rely on assistive technology in order to work. Our readers may remember our discussion of the incompatibility of screen readers with the peer review system used by many academic journals. I myself have used speech-to-text dictation after hand surgery. Recently, I suffered a new injury, which has meant that I am unable to use one of my hands on a keyboard. I was eager to return to Dragon Dictate, a program that I found enormously helpful several years ago. However, much to my unpleasant surprise, I learned that the manufacturer, Nuance, has stopped making the program available to those of us who use Apple computers (“Product Discontinuation,” n.d.).
I then decided to investigate how this occurred and how people who relied on this program found out that they were soon going to lose this remarkable resource. There are no other programs that come anywhere close to the capability of Dragon Dictate. Right now, I am writing this editorial with the use of the native dictation program in the Mac operating system, but it is extremely limited and takes perhaps five times as long as a similar session on Dragon Dictate. After reading many online user forums, I discovered that there was no warning whatsoever of the October decision to drop the product (Nichols, 2018). While I cannot ethically quote from user comments, I can say that the disappointment was widespread, and many users are simply panicked about how they will be able to continue working and doing what they need to do via their Mac computers.
The only solution would appear to be to stop using Apple products altogether and instead go out and buy a brand-new PC. This strikes me as an entirely unacceptable solution. But what can I do? And so I titled this editorial “Communicating Obsolescence,” as I am interested in also studying how users are notified when their products are no longer available. A similar situation exists in the United States with regard to medications, when insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers routinely decide to change what is covered and how much it will cost. A recent op-ed by a physician inThe New York Timesrecounted the hours of time spent trying to find a brand of insulin that would be covered for her diabetic patient, only to discover that they had all been removed from the preferred brand status (Ofri, 2019). Again, these actions were taken without any prior notification.
Decisions to discontinue products are, of course, made for business reasons. Nuance claimed that it was “constantly evaluating its product portfolio” to see how it could “best meet the needs” of its “customers and business.” It is well known that Apple has made it difficult for developers to work on its hardware. But it would seem that a company might have a certain responsibility to ensure that its users with disabilities are not completely left in a morass of inaccessibility. I encourage business and professional communication scholars to keep examining the ethical as well as legal dimensions of what it means to provide accessible educational and working environments.
This issue is the first in the new volume, and it represents the remarkable diversity of research in our field. You will find studies of CCing in email, signage, millennials’ views and expectations, interventions to improve student writing, and the impact of MBA case competitions. Note, however, that accessibility is not mentioned in any of these articles, so I would argue that there is a great need to always consider how our research questions may be shaped by ableist notions. In future issues we will continue our exploration of the scholarship of teaching and learning.